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Zappos was founded in 1999, during the Internet boom, to sell shoes online. The company's founding premise was to provide the ultimate in selection to its customers-all brands, styles, sizes, and colors. Zappos organized all aspects of its business (including recruiting, culture, call center, inventory, website, and supply chain) to provide the best possible service-it wanted to "wow" everyone who interacted with the company, from customers to employees to corporate partners. Zappos grew rapidly, and by 2008 was profitable with net sales (after returns) of about $650 million. The company faced a number of issues as it looked forward. While it had penetrated only about 3 percent of the U.S. market for shoes, Zappos had expanded its product lines to items such as camping gear and video games. It needed to determine those elements of its strategy had contributed to its success in shoes, and whether it would be able to duplicate that success in other product lines. It also needed to determine how it could scale its business-much of the effort it had made to "wow" its customers was labor intensive and expensive-could this be scaled to a company with revenues of tens of billions? Finally, the economic landscape changed dramatically in late 2008, with the financial market collapse and recession. The service-intensive Zappos.com business was based on sales at little to no discount, unlike many websites that relied on selling at the lowest possible price. Would the company need to make changes to respond to the changed economic environment, and if so, what were those changes? The case provides an opportunity to evaluate the core competences of an Internet retailer that has experienced rapid, initial success. The case enables students to consider supply chain issues, which are critical to the company's success, in the broader context of the business: the bases of Zappos' success, its core competencies, culture, and competitive environment.

learning objective:

The case highlights an Internet retailer that has grown rapidly, but faces significant issues, including scope of product offerings, supply chain costs, customer service costs, and scalability. The teaching objective of the case is to examine these issues, and the considerations that the company must make in choosing a way forward.

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Building a strong supply chain is essential for business success. But when it comes to improving their supply chains, few companies take the right approach. Many businesses work to make their chains faster or more cost effective, assuming that those steps are the keys to competitive advantage. To the contrary: Supply chains that focus on speed and costs tend to deteriorate over time. The author has spent 15 years studying more than 60 companies to gain insight into this and other supply chain dilemmas. His conclusion: Only companies that build supply chains that are agile, adaptable, and aligned get ahead of their rivals. All three components are essential; without any one of them, supply chains break down. Great companies create supply chains that respond to abrupt changes in markets. Agility is critical because in most industries, both demand and supply fluctuate rapidly and widely. Supply chains typically cope by playing speed against costs, but agile ones respond both quickly and cost efficiently. Great companies also adapt their supply networks when markets or strategies change. The best supply chains allow managers to identify structural shifts early by recording the latest data, filtering out noise, and tracking key patterns. Finally, great companies align the interests of the partners in their supply chains with their own. That's important because every firm is concerned solely with its own interests. If its goals are out of alignment with those of other partners in the supply chain, performance will suffer. When companies hear about the triple-A supply chain, they assume that building one will require increased technology and investment. But most firms already have the infrastructure in place to create one. A fresh attitude alone can go a long way toward making it happen.

learning objective:

To discover three characteristics that define a high-performing supply chain: agility, adaptability, and aligned incentives.

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Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Vancouver Division faced a challenge in 1990. Although its new inkjet printers were selling well, inventory levels worldwide were rising as sales rose. In Europe, high product variety was making inventory levels especially high. HP considered several ways to address the inventory issue: air-freighting printers to Europe, developing more formalized inventory planning processes, or building a factory in Europe.

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After deciding to transform a former government-owned poultry farm in Ethiopia, two American business partners encounter challenges related to input costs, inventory management, delivery, government relations, and other key challenges that are common to entrepreneurs operating in an emerging market context. The partners identify Ethiopia as a country in which to build their business because of its favorable investment climate, and they decide to pursue poultry because of significant latent demand and a lack of suppliers. The partners address many of the challenges they face by adjusting their business model to better control a more limited set of risks. In lieu of raising and slaughtering the chickens themselves, they develop a network of rural farmers to raise the day-old chicks to maturity, enabling the farmers to make a profit as well. The partners also develop a close relationship with the government, leaning on them for the areas where the government excels; namely, farmer mobilization, communication, and messaging. The government therefore helped identify rural farmers that could help raise the day-old chicks and identified customers for those rural farmers for the meat and eggs. The model has proven effective and impactful. Rural farmers who have chosen to work with Mekelle Farms and who have disproportionately been women now have a significant source of income. The community now also has access to poultry breeds that produce more meat and eggs in less time than local varieties, thus resulting in better income and nutritional outcomes. While setting up a business in Ethiopia has proven difficult, the case demonstrates how one company was able to mitigate many of those challenges and succeed in many ways.

learning objective:

The objective of this case is to expose students to the myriad challenges that can present themselves to entrepreneurs who hope to operate in an emerging market, particularly in the industry of agriculture. The purpose is to identify those challenges, which include supply chain issues, a lack of clarity on future input costs, a highly inflationary macroeconomic picture, and government relations challenges, and to analyze how one company attempted to mitigate those challenges.

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Before opening its first store in India in 1996, McDonald's spent six years building its supply chain. During that time, the company worked to successfully source as many ingredients as possible from India. However, French fries ("MacFries") were a particularly tough product to source locally-and importing fries was undesirable for both cost and availability reasons. Growing potatoes suitable for use as fries was challenging in India. By 2007, 11 years after opening its first restaurant, the MacFry was finally being produced in India. McDonald's main MacFry supplier was the Canadian company McCain, which spent many years working on potato agronomy and with farmers to build up supply in India. From 2007 to 2011, local MacFry production increased from none to 75 percent of sales. Despite the strides made, in 2011 Abhijit Upadhye, McDonald's then senior director of Supply Chain India was still a worried man. Double-digit food inflation in India had been putting cost pressure on the company. McDonald's had aggressive growth plans for the coming years. The company had 240 restaurants, and planned to more than double by 2014. The MacFry was the single largest procurement item, so having a 100 percent local supply was critical to avoiding high import duties. The question that troubled him was: "Will I ever be able to eliminate imported fries from my supply chain?" This case describes McDonald's India and McCain India's efforts to optimize the MacFry supply chain by increasing local supply in a fast-growing emerging market using agronomy, farmer relationship development and value chain innovation.

learning objective:

This case is designed to help students learn concepts useful for understanding supply chain optimization and ways to achieve assured supply in fast-growth markets. The case can help students think about how socially responsible practices and supply chain management can work together to reduce costs and assure supply.

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As the world population exceeded 7 billion by the end of 2011, various agencies working to alleviate poverty had come to a general consensus that pure charity was not a sustainable solution. In the absence of venture capital and angel investors in developing markets, Microfinance (MF) was one of the most promising tools in the fight against poverty. MF institutions tended to focus on micro-lending, providing small loans to micro-entrepreneurs from which interest could be earned. This case details the issues and challenges that Microfinance institutions faced a decade into the new millennium. The rise of mobile technology is a key theme as it promised innovative solutions. The case discusses various mobile financial services, including Safaricom's M-Pesa and M-Kesho offerings, and focuses on Experian's MicroAnalytics (EMA) unit, created to serve the financial services sector in developing countries. EMA developed an innovative system to enable financial service providers (clients) to serve their customers via a distributed, branchless, "mobile only" model. After a successful pilot study in the Philippines, EMA created a mobile banking platform that offered the potential of extending mobile money to other financial services as well as new customer and geographic segments.

learning objective:

To explore how mobile technology was driving innovations in Microfinance, a promising approach to combating global poverty. To learn about Experian MicroAnalytics and the platform it created that could exponentially expand mobile money and financial services in the developing world.

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In 1984, Trung Dung fled political persecution in Vietnam, the country of his birth, to arrive in the United States as a refugee with only $2 in his pocket. Over the next two decades, he proved his mettle as one of the most astute and successful Vietnamese-American entrepreneurs. Although Dung had never thought that he would return to Vietnam, the instinctive entrepreneur inside him recognized the opportunities presented by country's rapidly developing and modernizing economy. Dung returned in 2007 to found MobiVi, an Electronic Financial Transactions (EFT) firm. This case explores the intersection of mobile network operators, the ETF industry, and social entrepreneurs to pursue an innovative approach to providing financial services to the approximately 2 billion people worldwide who lacked access. The focus is on three of MobiVi's areas: the Nationwide Distribution System (NDS) unit, MobiVi's innovative offerings around financial services (MFS), and MobiVi Foundation. In 2012, Dung was looking at how to address market inefficiencies, help MobiVi's investors and business partners create and capture more value, and make credit more accessible to the middle and lower income classes in Vietnam. Dung was optimistic given the positive state of the Vietnamese economy, the patented MobiVi payments processing technology, and the most recent developments in telecommunication technologies.

learning objective:

To learn about how MobiVi, a Vietnamese Electronic Financial Transactions firm, pursued an innovative approach to providing financial services.

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This is an update to GS-61, describing developments at the company through 2011, including a major acquisition, distribution in China, and an initiative to cultivate start-ups that might grow into future clients.

learning objective:

Appreciate the complexity of the global technology supply chain, and discuss steps that PCH has taken to expand its business.

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Multinational corporations are under growing pressure to make sure that their contractors and subcontractors in China meet environmental standards in their operations. Yet traditional approaches to ensuring environmental, health and safety compliance, such as checklist audits, have proved problematic. The authors conducted research over a one-and-a-half-year period with leading multinational buyers (mostly in the apparel and footwear industries) as well as with NGOs and industry groups active in China. Based on their research, the authors report that rather than simply monitoring Chinese suppliers'compliance with local environmental, health and safety (EHS) standards, leading companies are giving suppliers tools and incentives to independently improve environmental performance. They are helping suppliers use energy, water and materials more efficiently and reaching deeper into their supply chains to where the greatest environmental damage occurs. At the same time, they are overcoming their traditional reluctance as competitors to cooperate in monitoring and fixing problems at common suppliers.<BR> <BR>The authors describe innovative approaches that companies such as Nike are taking. More generally, the authors' recommendations include working closely with suppliers and providing incentives for identifying, disclosing and addressing problems; establishing collaborative relationships with NGOs and industry groups; and finding ways both to learn from suppliers'best practices and to facilitate learning among suppliers.<BR>

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